Drawing for Animation Final

So for one of the class assignments we got to design whatever we wanted.  I had a character in mind named Hyacinth based off of the macaw, so I decided to do her.  However, none of the silhouettes really worked, but I picked a favorite and went ahead anyway.

After the silhouettes I did several sketches.

I colored the final sketch up with the Hyacinth Macaw blue and yellow, but then my husband pointed out that she looked like the cartoon hero Static Shock (who I had no knowledge of up to this point).  They had super similar outfits down to the yellow goggles.  I decided to try and make my character different and tried a Red and Green Macaw for the colors instead.  It turned out much more fun and my character Red was born.  She's from a future post-apocalyptic bio-punk type of civilization and is a genetically engineered being.

For the final project we had to come up with three characters, an animal, a prop, and two environments.    I wanted to create a story around Red, so I kept her in mind for the entire project.  Again, the first step was silhouettes.

I chose the silhouettes I liked best and also chose birds to base the colors of the characters off of.  The birds are, from left to right, Chestnut-backed Chickadee, Ornamental Hawk-Eagle, and Blue-winged Mountain Tanager.  All of them are genetically engineered as well.  Their wings work, but they can't fly with them.  They're not quite structured right for that, so they need mechanical aid.  Red has no wings, just feathers where the wings should be.  Fledge has a robotic arm.

For the animal I decided to base his colors off a Tiger-striped Tree Frog.  They are so awesomely cool looking.

I struggled really badly with the environments.  I need to practice on those a lot more.

 

And the prop!  I decided that they would use speeder bike things to provide the thrust to let them fly.  The bike provides the propulsion, while their wings provide the lift and steering.  I think it's pretty sweet, and my teacher like the concept as well.

So there you have it!  My drawing for animation final.  I do intend to use all of this for a story someday, so please don't steal any of it.  :)  All this stuff is copyright to me.

Drawing for Animation with Jake Parker

Warning, it's another long post.  Lots of pictures.

So, my last semester at BYU I was able to take another class from the amazing Jake Parker.  Of all the teachers I've learned from, he is the one I learn the most and grow the most with.  The drawing for animation class is a basic concepts of drawing kind of class, and it was nice to go over those again.

You can see all the lectures and student's work on the class blog.  It's good stuff.  You should check it out.

Okay, now let's go through the whole semester!
The first assignment was to draw every day so that by the scheduled final we had 106 drawings.  I'll put the best of those together in another post and upload that another day.

Assignment #2 was to redesign a Mario universe character and practice inking styles/mediums on it.  I chose Princess Rosalina, who I did not know existed until this assignment.  The first time I used a micron, brush, and ballpoint pen.  I basically failed the assignment since I made them look all really close to the same.  

I redid the assignment with mechanical pencil, ballpoint pen, and a brush pen to try and get different results.  Jake like these much better.  :)

Then I colored her for fun and practice.

The third assignment was to redesign a character from the Nintendo franchise.  I picked the Mailman from Twilight Princess.  He weirded me out the first time I saw him and I decided he needed to be fixed.  The first step was to do silhouettes and design a character based off of the silhouettes.

The Silhouettes

   

 

My first pass.

 Jake didn't like this one so much.  He really liked the outfit, but the design was fairly standard and didn't push the shape of the figure.  I waited until the end of the semester to redo him since I wanted to learn more and improve my drawing skills before trying again.

I did more silhouettes.

This was the final redesign.

I don't know what Jake thinks of this one, since I turned it in after class was over before the final deadline for everything, but he did help me pick out the silhouette, so maybe he likes it?  I like it.  It's very different from anything I've done before, and nothing like the original character from Twilight Princess.

The fourth assignment was to draw a sea captain.  I decided to draw a lizard pirate.  I like lizards.  We had to do silhouettes for all of the assignments from this point on, but I'm not going to show them too you so that this post doesn't get horrendously long.

For the fifth assignment we drew different poses with our sea captains.  We were to do two expression poses, and two action poses.  This was the first assignment I didn't have to do any reworking on.

For the sixth assignment we got to draw anything we wanted, as long as it was a character.  I drew Red, but I based the big final project around her so I'll save her for my next post.

For the seventh assignment we drew animals.  I decided to take a stab at designing the llama in my webcomic!  Her name is Maple.  Jake really liked her and praised me for doing the structural drawing over the silhouette since that's what made the design really work.  This was the only other assignment I didn't have to do any reworking on.

Then the last assignment before the final was to do compositions with an environment, five exterior and five interior.  Environments and backgrounds are not my strongest thing, I struggle with them, but I'll still share those scribbly drawings with you.

Some of these drawings influenced my environment designs in the final project, so those might look a little familiar when I post that later.

So there you have it!  This is a significant chunk of what I did during my last semester of college.  There will be more posts following this one with more stuff from this class, but this is most of the big assignments.  I love learning from Jake Parker.  I grew a lot this semester and I finally feel like my art is on the good side of borderline!  I made a couple drawings for this class that I thought looked professional or better than I thought I could draw.  Drawing every day helped a lot.  I need to get back on that again.  :P

Concept Design 2 - Chook's Story

After taking concept design 1 from Jake Parker, I took concept design 2 from Justin Kunz (2012 winter semester).  Justin used to work at Blizzard on their environment concept design stuff, and it was his first semester teaching at BYU.  He gave us the option of working on redesigning The Wizard of Oz for the class, or doing our own thing.  I chose to do my own thing and did concept development for one of the novels I'm writing.  It helped me to get me thinking about the story.  Lots of what I came up for for this class is already out of date for the story, but hey, it was good to work through.  Let's go through the environment stuff first.

First I did a bunch of castle silhouettes, then designed a couple castles I liked.  However, the castle in the book is now nothing like this.  The only thing that's similar to what's in the book at the moment are the adobe houses along the sides of the cliff walls.

Ok.  Let's move on to characters!

 First we have Chookery.  He spends a large part of the story stuck as a cat.

 Then we have head roughs for the demon king.  We're not going tho even look at his full body sketch... it's atrocious.  On the right we have the first full body sketch for Ruth, our heroine of the story.

This is Finna.  She didn't exist until this class, but wow.  She came into being and demanded a large role in the story.

As part of the final I redesigned Ruth and drew different outfits for her to wear over the course of the story.  She gets tan.

Then after the class was over I went and did a bunch of outfits for Chookery.  I should redo him.  I should redo all of the people.  I have improved a lot since I drew these a year ago.

Now, on to the animals and critters!  I think they're still pretty close to what's actually in the story.

This is Behemoth.  He went through a couple stages before I settled on the bottom blue drawing.

An ogre, and a troll.  They still need some tweaks, but overall I still like them.

 Dragons!  There's going to be dragons in the story.  Any good fantasy adventure needs them.

Unicorns!  We'll have some wild and dangerous ones, and some more tame and friendly ones.

And lastly, a dard.  I drew him after the class as well while I was writing over the summer.  Dard's are real mythical beasts, but of course I'm altering them to be what I want in my story.

So there you have it, a lot of my concept work for this class and my story.  I have improved a lot since then, but I still have a lot more to work on.  Upward an onward!